Bishop Boykin

Herein I am going on record in support of Senator George Allen's demand that Lieutenant General William "Jerry" Boykin be given the to soon-to-be-vacant post of Special Operations Commander now held by General Bryan "Doug" Brown.

Boykin has already met the first requirement, that his nickname have absolutely no perceptible relation to his real name. This demonstrates a finely tuned tradecraft intuition, developed from early childhood, when their parents and friends had already recognized that these guys needed code-names. Special Operations needs special people in charge. And Jerry Boykin is as special as they come.

There are times when a stroll down memory lane is like a walk in the park during daffodil season; other times it is a house of horrors; my memory of Jerry is from the time we spent together from early 1983 until late 1986 as members of the US Army's highest priority unit, one modified by the adjectives "elite" and "counter-terrorist," and one iconographed onto the militarized American psyche by mystique-bearing rumors and by the cinema -- Delta Force. This memory is rather like a funhouse after a peyote milkshake.

For Jerry, this was probably not a happy time. We were, by and large, a venal bunch who drank like piranha and were as adulterous as bull sea lions. Jerry is a deeply committed theocrat, convinced not only of the literal doctrines of Biblical inerrancy, virgin birth, and substitutionary atonement. He was the personal designate of a muscular, martial Christ who had commanded us to put as many Muslim heathens as possible to the sword. Had it not been for the two other devoted fundamentalists at Delta Force in those days -- Lance Finnick and Marshall Brown -- I'm sure Jerry might have risen up in righteous anger and smitten many of us, his colleagues in the true American Army of Jesus.

Lance and Marshall, and a few others who didn't care to miss breakfast and wanted to be nice to Jerry, used to attend the occasional prayer breakfasts Jerry organized in the Delta Force mess hall. Marshall, alas, who unlike Lance had seen the light only part-way through his tenure at Delta Force, fell. Marshall's rebirth held fast for only a couple of years, and he went on to become an infamous serial rapist. Marshall may have crawled back into the cosmic womb in prison for another crack at naissance. I don't know.

Jerry, however, moved right up. How can one not, after all, who is the direct subject of divine providence? And how can we not at least suspect that the deracinated nicknames of Jerry and Doug are not "a sign?"

I can remember just like it was yesterday how our intelligence briefings would begin back then, when Jerry was on the operations staff of Delta Force.

"Good news. The Iran-Iraq War continues." Laughter would course through the room, consolidating that warm feeling of fraternal geniality with the shared knowledge -- even between the chosen Jerry Boykin and us lost lambs serving under him as God's instruments -- that the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim.

We don't know when Jerry fell temporarily from grace, but it was sometime just before the mission to Somalia to attempt the capture of Mohammad Farah Aidid. Jerry stated about that one, "I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol." Unfortunately, the US forces left there with their tails between their legs, and Aidid was given a ride on an American C-130 turboprop to negotiate his status with the international diplomatic community.

But Jerry bounces back, and God favored him with promotions and notoriety and a Teflon ass. He managed to get away with saying that the enemy in the GWOT (that's the global war on terror), pronounced Gee-What, is none other than... Satan. That's right. The Monarch of Hell himself! And to secure this pronouncement firmly inside a tautology, Boykin the Baptist assured a group of Oregonian fans that George W. Bush "[is] in the White House because God put him there." God himself -- the great cosmic patriarch -- is a registered Republican, and his executive emissary, Archdeacon Bush, is made to appear dumber than a box of raisins for the same reason God planted all those trilobite fossils and dinosaur skeletons in Montana -- to test our faith and willingness to accept Biblican inerrancy and the miraculous simultaneity of free will and predestination.

I support this, because the world needs Jerry Boykin in charge of the oh-so-special operations, and it needs an Imperial President like George Allen. I am as serious as two dogs copulating on the White House lawn. If this system has to go over a cliff, who better to take it there than these two theocratic Mussolinis.